Language Change

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Language Change

• Pidgins and Creoles
• Historical Linguistics
• Language Change

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Reminder Exam 1 is 9/25!

• Review sheet is online
• PowerPoint slides print them out or get copies
  in 509 Williams for 10 cents/page
• www.uvm.edu/jadickin/anthropology 28.html
• Use the link to the textbook website there are
  flashcards and other tools to help study textbook
  material

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REVIEW SESSION

• MONDAY 9/24
• 7 PM in Williams room 402
• Also, I will have extra office hours Monday 9/24
  from 12 to 2

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Review types of language change

• See the Language Change handout
• External change
• Internal change
• Structural borrowing
• Lexical borrowing
• Functional shift
• Semantic shift

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Semantic inversion

• A form of semantic shift where a word takes on
  the opposite meaning.
• Semantic inversion is very common in slang and
  other vocabulary systems designed to exclude
  outsiders (e.g. thieves jargons)
• Examples
• Def (death) good
• Gnarly good
• Sick good

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Lexical Borrowing Lee article

• The online reading by Margaret Lee focuses on
  lexical borrowing of African American words or
  expressions into a mainstream newspaper
• Lee found words in use that had been borrowed
  into mainstream American English during different
  periods of American history

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Scope of prestige

• While Lee found many examples of borrowings from
  African American English into mainstream
  newspaper writing, she also showed that the
  prestige associated with African American English
  is concentrated in areas such as entertainment,
  sports, and celebrity news

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Social Factors in Vocabulary Change

• At any point in a language change, some members
  of the group will speak the old way and some
  will speak the new way.
• This can create or reinforce social boundaries.
• What are some social boundaries that language
  change creates or reinforces?

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Our new word

• What will give the word legs?
• What areas of our vocabulary seem to be the most
  productive for new words?
• Try to come up with a new word semantic shift,
  coinage, clipping etc.

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Endangered Languages
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Language Shift/Death

• One result of language contact can be language
  shift, where speakers begin to speak a new
  language and stop speaking their former language.
  Over time, this can result in language death.
• This phenomenon is happening all over the world,
  and has already happened to many Native American
  languages in the U.S.

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Three stages of language death

• In language shift, people begin to use one
  language more than another, and may encourage
  their children to pick the new language.
  Eventually, the community is using one language,
  not the other.
• A language is moribund if no children are
  learning the language as their first language
• A language is dead if there are no living
  speakers of the language.

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Language Revitalization

• Language revitalization is an attempt to
  resurrect a language that is moribund through
  increasing the number of people who are learning
  and speaking the language
• Language revitalization programs focus on getting
  people to learn and speak a dying language and
  teach it to their children
• More on this in Week 14!

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Language ideology

• Revitalization programs often must work against
  social ideas about or prejudices against the
  dying language.
• For example, the language may not be considered
  modern, or may be associated with lack of
  education, negative ethnic stereotypes, or be
  considered old-fashioned
• Example from our readings Garifuna

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Garifuna

• Garifuna is spoken in Belize and some other
  Central American countires
• Total number of current speakers is about 100,000
• Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken in
  Central America

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(No Transcript)
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Garifuna shame and shift

• Code choice in a mixed population in Belize
  Garifuna vs. Belizian Creole
• Speak Garifuna and identify with your ethnic
  group, or English Creole and identify as
  Belizean?
• Children are ashamed to speak Garifuna because it
  marks them as poor and backward
• Parents feel that speaking Garifuna is a sign of
  pride in who you are

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Exam question on Garifuna

• The essay question on the review sheet asks you
  to be able to describe the language situation in
  Belize what is the official language? What
  other languages are spoken? What is the nature
  of language shift among Garifuna children, and
  what reasons does the author give for the shift?

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Writing systems
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Types of Writing Systems

• Ottenheimer, Chapter 7
• Logographic writing systems written symbols
  represent entire words (Chinese)
• Syllabic writing systems symbols represent
  syllables (Inuit)
• Alphabetic writing systems symbols represent
  individual sounds (Roman)

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Example of Inuktitut (Inuit)

• Syllabic writing systems were introduced to many
  Native American groups by missionaries and
  traders in the 1800s
• Eastern Inuktitut speakers adopted syllabics,
  while other groups use Roman or Cyrillic
  alphabets.

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Inuktitut Syllabary
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Writing and Technology

• In the 1960s, IBM created a typewriter that
  could type Inuktitut syllabics
• Not all the characters would fit, so one set of
  syllabics was removed (AI-PAI-TAI)
• With new computer fonts, these characters have
  been restored to the syllabary

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Writing and Standardization

• Writing systems are essential to developing a
  written standard for a language (duh)
• Writing systems may be chosen for convenience,
  for linguistic reasons, or for ideological
  reasons
• Even after the writing system has been chosen,
  there may be a lot of negotiation about which
  dialect(s) the written standard will be closest
  to
• However, having a written language can improve
  the social status of a language and make it
  easier to teach, helping revitalization efforts.

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Pidgins and Creoles

• The production of new languages in contact
  situations

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Pidgins

• A pidgin is a trade language actually it is
  grammatically simpler in form than a true
  language and does not have full elaboration of
  function.
• Over time, as people expand the situations in
  which they use a pidgin, it can be come fully
  elaborated and then become a creole, through the
  process of creolization.

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Creoles

• When a highly elaborated pidgin (one with that
  can serve all the communication needs of its
  speakers) reaches the point where children are
  learning it as their first language, it has
  become a creole, a fully functional and
  elaborated language that emerged from the
  interaction of two or more languages.
• This process is called creolization.

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Power and Creoles

• Creolization occurs in situations where one
  language is associated with more power than
  another. Some people limit creoles to
  languages that arise in cases of forced movement
  or colonization.
• The language on which a creole is based is called
  the matrix language.

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Example

• Hatian Kreyol - a French creole spoken in Haiti
• French is the matrix language, but West African
  languages contributed phonology, vocabulary and
  some elements of the syntax.

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Examples from Next Years Words
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Creole Continuum

• The creole continuum extends from deep creole,
  usually spoken by people at the bottom of a
  stratified system, to a standard form of the
  matrix language.
• Barbadian----------B. Creole-------Barbadian
• Creole (medium) English
• (deep)

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Tok Pisin

• Tok Pisin is a creole language spoken in Papua
  New Guinea that is rapidly gaining speakers. One
  of 2 official languages of Papua New Guinea
• Tok Pisin has been standardized and is used in
  written language, broadcasting, and oral
  communication. You can even search the internet
  in Tok Pisin.

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Krio

• Krio is an English creole language that is one of
  the official languages of Sierra Leone.
• 4,000,000 speakers, about 10 are native speakers
  around 23 languages are spoken in Sierra Leone

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Jamaican Creole

• Grammatically distinct from English.
• Some examples
• di woman dem the women
• Mi ron I run (habitually) I ran
• Mi a ron I am running
• Mi ena (ena) ron I was running
• Mi en ron I have run I had run

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Variations in New Englishes

• She is knowing her science very well (E. Africa)
• I graduate there in 1990. (PNG)
• Before I always go to that market (Malaysia)
• -------
• pay attention on it (India)
• -You didnt come by car? (India)
• - Yes, I didnt.
• -------
• Dont kacho me when I want to work! (Malaysia)
• When we get home, we ask daddy to changkol the
  garden (Singapore)

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Historical Linguistics

• Historical Linguistics is the study of how
  languages change and develop over time, and how
  languages are related to each other.

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Laziness Principle

• This principle argues that changes in
  pronunciation happen because deleting or changing
  sounds in a word results in a pronunciation that
  requires less effort.
• I AM becomes Im
• mylne (Old English) becomes mill

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The Great Vowel Shift

• A shift in the entire vowel system of English
  taking place in the 15th and 16th centuries.
  Each changes was part of a domino effect
• Seven Middle English vowels were altered over
  this period
• Middle English Modern English
  Meaning
• hus haws
  house
• wif wayf
  wife
• gos gus
  goose
• nam? nem
  name
• h?m hom
  home
• s? si
  sea

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Northern Cities Vowel Shift

• A chain shift in the vowels of the dialects
  spoken in urban areas around the Great Lakes
  (Detroit, Chicago, etc.)
• http//www.ic.arizona.edu/lsp/Northeast/ncshift/n
  cshift.html

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Ottenheimer points out

• Dialect variation and change is not new there
  is evidence of dialect variation in every
  language that has an ancient alphabetic writing
  system.
• How does written evidence work?
• Spelling conventions that reflect pronunciation
• Rhymes/puns in poetry

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Indo-European

• 1776 - Sir William Jones argues that Sanskrit (an
  ancient Indian language) and European languages
  are related
• This argument says that there is a
  Proto-Indo-European language from which most
  European and Indian subcontinent languages
  descended
• A protolanguage is an ancient language from which
  other languages of a given family or group are
  descended

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The Indo-European Family
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Comparative Method

• Looks for cognates (related words) in each
  language
• e.g. two
• Bengali dvi
• Danish to
• Greek duo
• Irish do
• Russian dva
• German zwei

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English, Dutch, German (pp. 220-1)

• Eng. Dutch
  German
• day dag
  Tag
• fish vis
  Fisch
• soft zacht
  sanft
• round rond
  rund

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Regularities

• Historical linguistics relies on the fact that
  large changes in languages usually follow rules
  that affect many different words and sounds at
  the same time
• For example, as a language changes, all the
  unvoiced stops at the start of a word may become
  voiced, so ts become ds, ps become bs and so
  forth. Meanwhile, another, related language may
  not be changing, or may change by a different
  rule. In the last example, f and s in
  English are v and z in Dutch.

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Regionality

• Often, language changes happen in different
  regions and at different times
• When languages move far enough away from each
  other, they become distinct and may even end up
  in different groups (e.g. Germanic vs. Slavic
  languages, which both descend from
  Proto-Indo-European)

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Common words

• By tracing common words across all the
  Indo-European languages, we can tell some things
  about the world of Proto-Indo-European which
  trees and animals people talked about, what
  concepts they had, etc.

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Take away points

• All languages are changing all the time, at many
  different levels
• Language change does not make languages better
  or worse, just different
• All languages, whether recent creoles or ones
  with a long written history are equally
  evolved.

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Dont forget!

• Review session with TAs Monday, 9/24
• 7-8 pm in Williams 402